RECYCLED IMAGES

film studies at the university of colorado boulder.
Historical and material approaches to the reuse, reformation and reconstitution of existing sources from Cubism to PostModernism. Originality, appropriation, authorship, intellectual property, found footage, home movies, readymades, remixes, copyleft and free culture.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Artist Shepard Fairey did *not* make his famous Obama/HOPE poster in Photoshop, or at least not entirely---he did research for images and downloaded one of them from the internets, which led to all the trouble. When Fairey's distributed poster caught on like wildfire soon enough the AP came along and sued him for copyright infringment (even though the photo in question was taken by Mannie Garcia). He immediately counter-sued claiming that his use of the images falls squarely within the boundaries of transformation and fair use. They settled out of court and Faireys image for Obamas campaign has spawned thousands of versions and remixes, like this one or any of these. Well we watched a Photoshop tutorial on how to make a graphic design image like Fairey's, which was inspired by artist Barbara Kruger which was inspired by the Russian Constructivists for whom art was a practice for social change. We started with our own faces and the rest is history. Thanks to Eric for the animated gif inspirations and for showing us how to make them in Photoshop!

Thursday, November 21, 2013

For our final night of screening and discussions we looked at the work of artist Oliver Laric, and his various media essays all known as Versions, where he traces multiple histories of the practice of copying in art making, challenging the notion of *the original* and leading us particularly into the present moment with the digital production and circulation of images.

We then checked in some *very* current events via THIS MASHUP of Toronto mayor Rob Ford /Chris Farley (heh, great job, internet!)

And on to some other early 21st century media recuperations :

Keith Sanborn's Operation Double Trouble (2003), a detourned version of a propaganda film called Enduring Freedom, originally made by the US Marines and US Navy,

Bobby Abate's One Mile per Minute (2002), which he began working on soon after the attacks of September 11th out of disgust for the corporate branding of the disaster on various news stations .

Artist-activist Joseph deLappe's intervention into the online game America's Army, Dead-in-Iraq (2006-2011) where he individually listed each American casualty of the war by name, using the games text messaging,

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Group presentation week on all the above categories with amazing examples! We listened to a general explanation of REMIX culture stemming from musical forms from Beethoven to Lee Scratch Perry, though remix video is a highly popular way of taking on contemporary media these days--here's a whole site dedicated to the latest in political remix videos of all kinds. MASHUP remixes made using two distinct sources like The Dark Side of the Rainbow (try this at home), VIDDING and the grandmother of fannish vids Both Sides Now (1975) by Kandy Fong, SUPERCUTS, a term coined by blogger Andy Baio in 2008 to describe obsessive works as The Usual Suspects -- also check this supercut we didn't watch in class but is mentioned in Ed Halters article below : ARTIST LOOKING AT THE CAMERA (2006) by Guthrie Lonergan who raided the Getty Images Archive for his sources as we can tell by the watermarks he leaves intact. Lastly we investigated MEMES, actually short for mimesis, and according to the dictionary literally means "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture". We learned about 4chan as ground zero for memes, and looked at examples that ran the gamut - lolcats to pop culture references to political current events --like "Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop”, a photoshop meme based on a photograph of the police officer who offhandedly pepper sprayed a group of Occupy protesters at the University of California Davis in November 2011.

We ended the session with Buffy vs. Edward by pop culture hacker Jonathan Mcintosh, a remix/mashup as a pro-feminist visual critique. He has extensive liner notes on youtube, like

+++Read for next week: Ed Halter's RECYCLE IT! (2008) from The Museum of the Moving Image's website for a nice lively read of our beloved and rebellious subject +++

Friday, November 8, 2013

Today we listened to lawyer and activist Lawrence Lessig explain a few things in his 2007 TedTAlk "Laws that Choke Creativity" . Lessig is the author of several books, like The Future of Ideas (2001), Free Culture (2004), and Remix: Making Art and Commerce thrive in a hybrid economy (2008) . He has transformed intellectual property law as a founding member of Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to building better copyright and copyleft practices through principles established first by the open-source software community.
The winner of Creative Commons 2003 moving image contest is Justin Cone's Building on the Past--licensed as (CC BY), one of the many attributions for their different types of licenses that you can tailor to your specific desires. Watch his movie and see how it works.